And that was when I learned, by experience, that big powder burns faster than little powder. When I lighted one end of the powder- snake, it blasted fire and smoke right up into my face. I fell back quickly for protection. Then I reopened my eyes just in time to see my fireball fizzle out at the far end of the rick of powder. I hardly saw any of what happened—it was all gone in two or three seconds. I was glad no one else had seen it. Needless to say, that ended my monkeying around with powder, trying to play powder monkey.
There was no one at the quarry who really knew how to blast efficiently. But then one day a man came out and showed Earl how to use electric blasting caps instead of the fuses he had been using. By drilling shallow holes, placing less explosives in each hole, and setting them off all at once, electrically, the blasting was much more efficient and a lot safer. Before that time, the custom was to set off a small blast in the bottom of a deep hole for the purpose of opening up a "pocket" large enough to hold as many as eight cans of powder and 80 sticks of dynamite. That didn't result in a lot of usable rock for the road we were building. Instead, it mostly made a big hole in the ground and sent rocks high into the air.
Earl did most of his blasting late in the afternoons after work hours when the workers were out of the quarry. When he was ready to set off a blast, he yelled, "FIRE IN THE HOLE," and everybody took cover, and the most reliable cover was a lot of distance. I saw a few rocks as large as your fist fall a half-mile away. One time a rock about the size of a basketball went so high and came down so fast that it came down through the roof of the cook shack, came on down through the ceiling, landed in a stack of metal dinner plates and took them down through the table and on down through the floor. Another time, one man got under a wagon for protection. The heavy wagon bed protected him from the falling rocks, but one huge rock rolled against a wheel and scooted the wagon sideways a couple of feet.
They told us that before we went to work there, one blast failed to go off for some reason. They waited ever so long and it still didn't go off. Then finally they cautiously ventured out from hiding and it blew up with Marvin standing almost on top of it. It must have been a small charge or it might have killed him. He said, however, it was big enough. He said he looked down on trees during his flight. I don't know, really. Of course it could be true, it happened in Texas you know.
One day a man signed on to work for Marvin, worked a couple of days, and disappeared without asking for his pay. We had not known it at the time—even the bookkeeper thought nothing of it, but when a couple of men came out a week later and arrested one of the mule-skinners, (lingo meaning mule driver) we put two and two together and came up with the answer. The man who had worked two days was an undercover agent for the F. B. I.
When arrested for manslaughter, the mule driver told the agents he had been expecting them. He had planned to work until payday and move on. They got him just before payday. He had been going to church regularly and had preached a few times in a little country church near by.
Well, we Johnsons were making money and things were looking good. But we might have suspected something would go wrong. I guess we should have moved on as the arrested man had been doing for months. But we, like he, stayed too long. Anytime our present and future looked that rosy, we might have known that financial disaster was lurking near by. The old devil was after me again. To calm our financial tempest, my family might have to throw me overboard, as the sailors did Jonah.
This time the bank went broke—the bank in which the road- building company had its money, the money which was paid to Marvin Hood month by month. He couldn't pay us. He couldn't even pay himself. Papa often paid cash out of his own pocket for supplies for Marvin. Then Marvin would repay him on payday. The bank closure caught Papa without any cash. And Marvin couldn't get any money to repay Papa. He couldn't even get a little money to help us get back to Hamlin.
We had the truck and the Dodge car. I don't know how we made it. I think we drove part way on kerosene; we could buy it for only four or five cents a gallon. And of course we arrived home hungry. Duck soup from a rusty bucket would have tasted good. After years of negotiating, Papa finally got about half the money Marvin owed him, and that included two of the wagons used for hauling the crushed rock at Gorman.
While there at Gorman, Old Scotch took sick with what was commonly known as sore mouth, and after many days of severe suffering, he finally died.